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Friday, July 1, 2011

Dear Julian , it was not the Wikileaks

Julian Assange and his Wikileaks team made this parody commercial about Wikileaks website and Egypt was there.

Making fun from MasterCard

I hate to say that the Egyptian revolution did not happen because of the Wikileaks cables about Egypt and Mubarak. For the record only very few cables were allowed to be published in Egypt. Nawara Negm even could not translate the cables related to Omar Soliman as Ibrahim Eissa warned her and she spoke about that on her twitter.

It is worth to say that till January 25th there were not too many cables related to Egypt after all. The biggest and explosive batch was released by the end of last year and they were related to the army , the events of Tunisia overshadowed it and no website nor newspaper dared to translate it if I was not mistaken.

I remember this very well because I was planning to publish their summary here but Tunisia’s overshadowed them and the only thing I can do was to publish a poll if those who read the latest patch of cable released by the end of 2010 believed or not and the majority did believe it.

Of course Al Masry Al Youm should be happy as its video was featured in the commercial. Needless to say that Julian Assange does not know how much was removed from the cables pre-Mubarak’s ousting in Al Masry Al Youm.

The Egyptians had many reasons to revolt against Mubarak and bring him down along his rotten corrupted the regime , they were not waiting for Wikileaks and the battle of Kasr Al Nil bridge is not a material for commercials , even political parody commercials !!

Wikileaks had no influence whatsoever on the Egyptian Revolution,which was brewing seriously since 2004 with the start of Kefaya movement followed by other dissident movements.This was coupled with the influence of active and brave writers,journalists,bloggers,...All this moved the street and it could be that the ignition came from Tunisia to set on fire the barrel of dynamite.So,Julian Assange you can go fly a kite!@amrazim2808

Just because the leaks were not officially published in Egyptian newspapers does not mean the Egyptian people did not know they existed before the uprising.

"Not to many cables" is not the issue and neither is the amount of contributions made by Wikileaks.

The fact that there were cables released before the uprising, and those cables did contain information detrimental to Mubarak, and that information was available to the Egyptian people is the point.

Of course, this whole issue is just another illogical straw man argument conjured up in an attempt to discredit Julian Assange the messenger, so as to attract attention away from the messages themselves.

Assange has never claimed that Egypt or Tunisia happened because of Wikileaks, but rather that Wikileaks helped and contributed to both revolutions. There can be no denying that fact. You can argue about whether the influence was miniscule or major, but there's no doubt it played a part.

Those who feel the need to scoff at Assange might want to reconsider their attitudes, and think about where they are getting their news.

Even if he did have something to do with it (and I go with the spit in the sea comment), what sort of crassness to look smugly at a camera and tout yourself as the puppetmaster of millions of people? Eccch.

@anonymous wikikleaks has nothing to do with tunisian revolution, cables revealed really few new things to tunisians, everybody in tunisia knew about the corruption of the president and his family in law, they could see that daily.

Availability and use of modern mass communication and information technology(including Wikileaks)was one of the vectors for fueling the Arab Spring, but the main driving engine behind it are the people and the stupidity of their rulers.The Canadian.

The Egyptian uprisings were inspired by the Tunisian uprisings which were inspired by Wikileaks. If "everyone knew about Ben Ali's corruption" as someone has said above, why didn't they do anything about it until after the WikiLeaks material was made available? The WikiLeaks release made it clearer and more articulate, easier to act on. Sorry - WikiLeaks was certainly the catalyst that initiated the Arab Spring.

I saw Assange speak in London tonight. He gave a more nuanced account of Wikileaks role in the Arab spring. Essentially he claimed that once they had revealed in public and to all parties the true extent of corruption in Tunisia, this prevented the US or France from getting involved in supporting Ben Ali as they would have done otherwise. From this they can claim some credit for the inspiration that Tunisia gave to Egypt (although he didnt actually do so tonight).

He also talked about when he lived in Cairo in 2007, apparently he lived in Miss Egypt's house, between the British and American Embassies

At Gary Lord: Can't deny W' contributed to Arab Spring? First, I get to decide what I can deny, not you. Second, I deny it! The dubious W' Tunisian cable was released two days AFTER ben Ali fled. Once again, that is AFTER ben Ali left the country. That fact that loyalist media like CNN and the Washington Post post-dated the lie doesn't make it true. Perhaps it is you who should contemplate changing news sources.

Did Muhamad Bouazizi's immolation have no effect? It happened months before the cable was released. Wikileaks was neither cause nor catalyst for the Tunisian revolution. Assange had nothing to do with it.

And what of Khaled Said? Was his murder not important? Should Zeinobia replace his photo with one of Julian Assange?

I wonder if this isn't just another case of racism. What Gary Lord is suggesting is as insulting as it is absurd. One has to believe that Arabs are just too darn stupid to understand when they are being oppressed, and need Julian Assange to enlighten them. One must believe that the people of Egypt and Tunisia were sitting around contentedly thinking they had it made until they saw those cables, and then millions of people poured into the streets as a result. That anyone attribute these uprisings to Assange, and that he now takes credit for them, is condescension and defamation toward the Arabs. It is an outrage.

I'm 51, and the Arab Spring has been the most exciting political development of my lifetime. The sight of all those brave people uniting against injustice has occasionally filled me with awe, and moved me to tears. To see these glorious eruptions of hope and humanity reduced to the machinations of one man, demeans not only the event, but the valor and brilliance of the people who made them happen. It is just obscene.

Ps, Those wishing to make contributions to Wikileaks can make their check out to the Central Intelligence Agency...

"It was a Tunisian group that created a web page called “Tunileaks” where they published all the reports on Tunisia from WikiLeaks, which point to the corruption of the former authorities.

When the regime blocked this website, I – using the name Hamadi Kaloutcha - took the initiative to translate the wiki cables about Tunisia into French through Google translate, and then distribute this information on Facebook. The page I created “Tunisie Wikileaks”, got 170,000 visitors during the first three days

...

WikiLeaks came at the right moment; the regime did not have any internal popular legitimacy, though foreign governments believed that Ben Ali was supported by his population. WikiLeaks taught the Tunisian people that even foreign diplomats from the West, among them the Americans, were not on good terms with the regime.

When Tunisians realised that their suspicions had grounds and were even well documented by foreign diplomats, there was no longer any excuse - the regime had to change."

Egyptians had 30 years to rise against the Mubarak regime. But for a few Djihadists, none did. It's absolutely not a coincidence that it happened 10 days after the Tunisian Revolution happened. With the same logic, it's absolutely not a coincidence that the Tunisian Revolution happened 6 months after the leaks on Tunisia were published. The information wasn't new. What was new is that US diplomacy, in the cables, expressed concern, but also outright fear of what the people might do eventually, and so they did. One man with a laptop was able to spark what 80 million Egyptians couldn't imagine they could do, but eventually did. Now the powder keg's explosion has reached the southern shores of Europe, with the rise of the Spanish and Greek peoples. If it wasn't for Wikileaks, the world would be a different place.

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